Michael Richardson: Philippines hostage cave-in misguided

COMMENT

SINGAPORE - As extremists in Iraq seize more foreign hostages amid worries that the same thing may start to happen in Southeast Asia, is the Asia-Pacific region starting to cave in to the demands of terrorists?

The Philippine Government's recent decision to withdraw its small contingent of troops from Iraq early and not replace them certainly suggests so.

Manila acted after militants kidnapped a Filipino truck driver, Angelo dela Cruz, as he made a delivery to a United States base. They held him for almost a fortnight and threatened to behead him unless their demand for the Philippines to withdraw its troops was met.

He was released unharmed but Manila's decision to comply with the terrorists' demand attracted harsh criticism, especially from allies of the Philippines like the US and Australia. "When you start meeting the demands of kidnappers, I think you're going down a very bad and slippery slope which incentivises kidnappings," said US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"I don't believe in the long run it is going to buy the Philippines immunity from future terrorist attacks," said Australian Prime Minister John Howard. "The record of al Qaeda and other organisations is that they hold weakness in contempt."

But in the Philippines, the plight of dela Cruz created a firestorm of public sympathy for the captured worker and his family.

Up to 8 million Filipinos, about 10 per cent of the population, work overseas, many in the volatile Gulf region. In 2003, they sent home about US$8 billion ($12.56 billion) to their families - a key source of foreign exchange for a weak economy.

In her State of the Union address last week, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo linked national economic priorities with her controversial decision to pull the troops out of Iraq. "I cannot apologise for being a protector of my people," she told Congress in Manila. "Sacrificing Angelo dela Cruz would have ... put the lives of 1.5 million Filipinos in the Middle East at risk by making them a part of the war."

Yet it was Arroyo's Government that decided to send the soldiers to Iraq as a gesture of allied solidarity with the United States.

Arroyo and her ministers evidently have short memories. The Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda affiliate based in the southern Philippines, gained strength in part because previous Philippine authorities sanctioned big ransom payments to recover hostages.

It is true that countries supporting the US in Iraq, including Australia, have become more prominent terrorist targets. But al Qaeda was on the offensive long before the US invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq, after the September 11 attacks.

The list of attacks claimed by, or reliably attributed to, al Qaeda goes back at least to 1993 when a truck bomb at the World Trade Centre killed six people.

Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, convicted of masterminding the 1993 attack, used the Philippines as a base for an unsuccessful plot to blow up in mid-air a dozen trans-Pacific flights in 1995.

In the 1990s, well before the Iraq invasion, al Qaeda bombed US targets in Saudi Arabia and Africa, and tried but failed to carry out attacks in Southeast Asia. Al Qaeda was involved in plans to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his visit to Manila in late 1994 and former US President Bill Clinton in the Philippines in early 1995.

Al Qaeda makes no secret of its aims. It wants to establish a pan-Islamic federation throughout the world. Southeast Asia, including the predominantly Christian Philippines, is to become a caliphate in this Taleban-style global federation.

Indonesia sought to avoid offending Islamic extremists by refusing to crack down on Jemaah Islamiyah after neighbouring countries warned of the danger from international terrorist networks in Southeast Asia. JI carried out the Bali bombing in 2002.

While the Philippine Government's decision to cave in to terrorism ends Asia-Pacific unity on the issue, there are no signs that the cracks are spreading. Two other US allies in Asia, Japan and South Korea, refused to yield to troop withdrawal demands after Iraqi insurgents captured their nationals this year.

* Michael Richardson, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.